


and if i'm wandering, i've wandered into just the right spot

by lecornergirl



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Car Trouble, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Road Trip, all that good shit, based on a true story (tm), bed sharing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 12:13:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14934071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lecornergirl/pseuds/lecornergirl
Summary: Like most of Clarke’s ideas, carpooling to Octavia’s wedding with Bellamy had been a great idea, until it wasn’t.





	and if i'm wandering, i've wandered into just the right spot

**Author's Note:**

> title from piece of your heart -- mayday parade

Like most of Clarke’s ideas, carpooling to Octavia’s wedding with Bellamy had been a great idea, until it wasn’t.

On paper, it was great: driving from Philadelphia to Boston was cheaper than flying, especially when compared to two people’s plane fare, and if Clarke wasn’t all that fond of flying, and knew Bellamy wasn’t either… well, it made it easier for her to extend the offer when he brought up the wedding, and for him to accept it.

Octavia had been Clarke’s college roommate, and Bellamy had been part of the package, checking up on Octavia often enough that she ended up just inviting him to go out with them, in the hope he’d stop worrying and have some fun. Clarke and Bellamy had never really spent much time together one-on-one, but when Octavia left for Boston after graduation, they started drifting closer, too busy and too set in their patterns to actively seek out new friends when they had perfectly workable existing acquaintances to befriend.

By the time the wedding came around, they’d worked up to the foundation of a solid friendship, the early stages kind where they met regularly for drinks to complain about their jobs and texted each other memes every few days. So the road trip was easy to agree on, and Clarke had no reservations about spending six hours each way in a car with Bellamy. They weren’t quite yet at the stage in a friendship where they spent much time in each other’s personal space, but a car seemed like a good starting point, and maybe then she wouldn’t feel as weird about inviting him to her apartment. And maybe if she got over the part where it was weird to invite him to her apartment, it would be easier to tell him she’s been lowkey in love with him since about a week after Octavia moved and they started hanging out.

The drive up had been uneventful, the wedding had been beautiful, and the next day, they’d left at a reasonable enough hour, on track to make it home by midnight. Everything had been great, until the GPS led them down some tiny backcountry roads, a truck came around a bend way over the midline, Clarke had to swerve slightly off the road to avoid getting hit—

_Pop!_

“Uh,” Bellamy said, at the same time as a light flickered on the dashboard. “That wasn’t a great sound.”

“Yeah, the tire pressure indicator on the dashboard isn’t amazing either,” Clarke grimaced.

“Should we pull over and check on it?”

Clarke glanced around, taking in the narrow, poorly-lit road. “I don’t want to just stop in the middle of the road, we’d probably get hit by the next truck that comes along. And I’m not convinced we’ll be able to start again if we stop now, so I’m just going to keep going, and we’re going to hope something comes along soon.”

Bellamy wasn’t convinced, but it was Clarke’s car and Clarke at the wheel, so he didn’t try and argue the point.

“Where are we, anyway?” Clarke asked, after a few tense minutes of literal nothing on the roadside.

“About half an hour into Connecticut, I think,” Bellamy replied, poking at the GPS. “Hey, looks like there should be a town coming up.”

Town might have been a strong word for it, but two minutes later they passed a sign informing them they were now entering Arcadia, population 2,647, and a moment later they approached a sign for an inn. Clarke turned into the parking lot and turned off the engine, and Bellamy could see some of the tension melt from her shoulders.

“Hey,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Look, it’s just a flat tire, it’s no big deal. Wasn’t even your fault, that truck would have decimated us otherwise. Do you have a spare?”

“Yeah, I—wait, shit, no, I loaned it to Raven last month and completely forgot to get a new one.”

“Fuck, okay. Triple A?”

“Yeah, I have the card here somewhere, hold on.”

“Okay, you call them, I’m going to go inside to let them know what happened but also mostly because I really need to pee.”

Clarke laughed. “Didn’t you go before we left?”

“You know I have the bladder of a five-year-old,” Bellamy grumbled before heading to the entrance of the inn.

The AAA woman on the phone didn’t seem impressed with Clarke’s lack of a spare tire, but assured she’d get someone out with a replacement as soon as possible.

“And where exactly are you?”

Clarke glanced at Bellamy, who had returned and was holding out his phone with a picture of the inn’s address on it.

“Uh, Eden Point Inn, Arcadia, Connecticut.”

There was some typing on the other end, then: “Okay, well, looks like you’re quite remote, especially for this time of night, but I should be able to get someone out to you in about ninety minutes. It might not be that long, but it could also be more, you never really know with these things.”

Clarke gave an incredulous huff as she hung up the phone moments later. In response to Bellamy’s questioning look, she mimicked, “Ninety minutes, maybe not that long, maybe even longer!”

Bellamy snorted. “Incredible, really. Okay, the inn has a bar, so… bar?”

“Please,” Clarke groaned. “Although if they really do make it in less than ninety minutes, I probably shouldn’t be drinking. Fuck, triple A is really going to ruin all of my fun, aren’t they?”

 

Ninety minutes later, Clarke was beginning to wish she’d had a drink. Bellamy had chosen to stick to soda in solidarity, and they’d worked their way through half the small bar’s soda stock and a couple of games of pool, but heard nothing from AAA.

“So, what do we do if they don’t show up?” she mused as it drew closer to nine o’clock.

“I don’t really see many options,” Bellamy pointed out. “Thank god you didn’t just pull over on the side of the road, though, as least here we can spend the night in an actual bed.”

Clarke was about to reply, but her phone finally started to buzz on the table.

“So, we can’t get anyone out to fix your tire since it’s so late,” the AAA woman started, which didn’t seem like the best way to start a call. “What we can do, however, is get someone to tow your car.”

“Okay, so, where would you tow us to?”

“Are you staying in the area?”

“No, we live in Philly, we were on our way back.”

“Okay, just a second… we could tow you to the Hartford branch, where you could get a temporary vehicle to get you home. Only problem is, you’re about 45 minutes away, and they close at half past ten, so it might be a tight fit. How does that sound?”

“Better than nothing, I guess,” Clarke said, and Bellamy looked up at the doubt in her voice.

“I’m just going to check some stuff, and I’ll get back to you soon, okay?”

“What was all that about?” Bellamy asked when she hung up.

“They can’t come fix the tire, but they can maybe tow us to Hartford to get us a temp car, except to do that they’d need to get the tow truck out here in the next half an hour, basically, because the Hartford branch is going to close.”

“And it’s nine on a Saturday evening and we’re in the middle of nowhere, so the chances of a tow truck getting here in that time frame are…”

“Oh, slim to none, absolutely,” Clarke said. “Time to have that drink.”

 

While at the bar, they took the chance to ask about rooms in the inn, and the woman behind the bar seemed genuinely surprised, as if she’d forgotten the place was an inn as well as a bar.

“We don’t get all that many tourists coming through here, to tell you the truth,” she said. “It’s forty dollars for a room—is it one or two rooms you’re wanting?”

“Uh…” Bellamy started, at the same time as Clarke said, “One should be okay, I think,” and she didn’t miss the way Bellamy tensed just a little beside her, or the bartender-innkeeper’s curious glances between them.

“Okay, well, it’s definitely available, but I do need to know by midnight if you’re going to book it or not.”

 

An hour later, Clarke hung up the phone, groaned, and dropped her head on Bellamy’s shoulder. He didn’t tense up this time, just rested his head on hers. “What now?”

“Oh, this is fun,” Clarke sighed. “That was a guy from somewhere called Polis Garage, who said triple A just now asked them to come and tow us to Hartford.”

“Just now? Don’t we need to be there by—"

“Seven minutes ago, yeah.”

“So how does that work?”

“He wasn’t really sure, he said he’d talk to triple A and get back to me soon. Maybe his soon actually means soon, wouldn’t that be something?”

Five minutes later, the man from Polis Garage called back to say AAA had cancelled the job on them, and that he was perplexed by the situation but couldn’t really help them further, and Clarke dropped her head onto the bar.

“We’re staying here tonight, aren’t we?” Bellamy asked, bringing a hand up to rub circles on Clarke’s back.

“I want to call triple A one more time and ask what the hell is going on, since Polis said they cancelled the tow job, but yeah, looks like.”

Predictably, AAA knew nothing about this supposed cancellation, and tried to claim that Polis had refused the tow job.

“Listen, I don’t really care, okay?” Clarke told the woman, and she would have felt bad for snapping at someone for doing their job, if it wasn’t for… well, everything that had happened. “What exactly are we supposed to do now?”

“You’re in the parking lot of an inn, so I’ll get someone from the booking agency we work with to call them and get you a room, and I’ll call back in a few minutes to confirm the room.”

“What time is it?” Clarke asked Bellamy, hanging up and putting her phone down.

“About a quarter to midnight, why?”

“Triple A lady said she would book us a room, but I have very little faith in her and if we want a room we need it booked by midnight, so we’re giving her eight minutes and then we’re doing it ourselves.”

“Sounds fair to me.”

 

Nine minutes later, Bellamy slid his credit card back into his wallet as Clarke unlocked the room.

She’d known they’d only booked one room, but she wasn’t expecting it to be quite so small. She had been planning on offering to sleep on a couch, or the floor if there wasn’t a couch, but there wasn’t really enough floor to sleep on.

Clarke flopped backwards onto the bed, almost crying at how soft it was. A second later, the bed dipped as Bellamy flopped down next to her.

Briefly, Clarke considered her options. They could go to sleep, each on their separate sides, and probably wake up spooning awkwardly and spend the next day avoiding the topic. But after the night they’d had, another frustrating miscommunication was pretty much the last thing she wanted, so… “Bellamy?”

“Hmm?”

“I’ve wanted to kiss you for months now, so if that’s not something you’re interested in, you should tell me now or I’m going to do it.”

He was silent for a moment, and she turned her head to look at him, expecting an apology in his eyes as he made some excuse about just not seeing her that way.

Instead, she saw him propped up on one elbow, rolling over to hover over her and cupping her face in his hand. “What are you waiting for?”

She reached up to kiss him, burying her hand in his hair, trying to pull him closer. He kissed his way down her neck, and she sighed, and it transitioned into a giant yawn. He laughed, and she could feel his chest rumbling above hers.

“Tired, princess?” he asked.

“It’s been a long day,” she grumbled.

“We can pick this back up in the morning,” he said, and she was going to argue, but the longer she spent lying on the bed, the more she wanted to melt into it and fall asleep. She tried to answer him, but all that came out was another yawn.

“Sounds like a plan,” he laughed. “Get up for a second, though, you do need to actually get into bed instead of just lying diagonally across it.”

“Why?” Clarke mumbled belligerently, but she was already sitting up. Bellamy sat on the edge of the bed to take his shoes off, and by the time he’d turned around again and started undressing for bed, Clarke had managed to throw most of her clothes haphazardly on the floor and burrow in under the covers.

She was already drifting off when he turned out the light and got in bed, but her arms came up around him when he kissed her forehead and whispered good night.

 

The next morning, they missed two calls from Polis Garage, but the car suddenly seemed unimportant in the grand scheme of things. They had better things to do.   

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact all of the car stuff is a simplified (i swear you can't make this shit up) version of something that happened to me the other week, except it was even more fun because  
> 1\. it was a rental  
> 2\. we were in the scottish highlands  
> 3\. one of the people i was with had a flight the next morning
> 
> the real version included even more miscommunication and shite customer service, but considerably less friends to lovers™, and we're still trying to sort stuff out with customer services, it's been fun
> 
> [also, no shade on AAA, idk what their customer service is like, i'm not US-based so i just picked the closest equivalent lmao]


End file.
